No news doesn't necessarily mean that Age of Empires 4 have not made significant progress.
E3 means you compete with a lot of games for attention. If Microsoft wants maximum attention for such a massive game its probably better to delay trailers / gameplay and show them later in the year or Relic / Microsoft is not confident enough in the current stage of the game. Internet is neither fair nor nice to alpha versions.

But I'm guessing that they're still in the process of figuring out stuff for both of the games so showing off an experimental build might hamper their image more than getting people hyped if you ask me, and even if they show off something really cool and don't deliver after that it's gonna be a huge let down ala DoW3.

Even so I think that they should involve the community more in the development of the game, these are supposedly triple A devs but as time has shown the business and marketing side have felt more disconnected from the player and fan bases so you end up with a good idea and a bad execution which leads to poor sales, again looking at DoW 3.

Doing like most Indie devs are with Early Access and simply doing polls, closed betas and collecting and reading a large amount of feedback, implementing changes based on said feedback and then doing more tests to see if people would play and like it is the right way in my opinion.

Since pre-ordering the CoH2 Collector's Edition in 2013 and spending more than 200 bucks on the game in total I've stopped pre-ordering games, the only game that I did "pre-pay" after that was Hell Let Loose around an year ago but that was just for a simple 25 dollars which I guess it's more or less fair in my book, it certainly isn't the 40-60 bucks most triple A devs ask for a pre-order or starting price on their games and you still don't know if they'll be a horrible mash up of RTS and MOBA.

Speaking of which, Relic could very easily turn the tables around and pull a No Man's Sky for Dawn of War 3 with a new expansion that massively overhauls the game's mechanics and adds in new factions and units and so forth. The No Man's Sky's devs were basically almost virtually hanged on their game's release but after fixing it in an year they were almost hailed as heroes which was a big turn around and proved that as most matches in Company of Heroes, the battle is not lost until you either lose the game entirely or you quit, forfeiting a come back and all chances of claiming a victory or at least a draw.

For me the best thing about E3 was Keanu Reeves Cyberpunk 2077 and Bethesda hype squad. Freaking out over every other Bethesda sentence was hilarious and cheering loud for Fallout 76 updates+mobile games.
Related to Relic and AoE, the biggest E3 announcement was not even on show but this:

At face value this makes sense.
1) But AoE4 has been in pre-production since Relic gave up on CoH2 development in 2015 and likely full production since 2017.
2) AoE4 announcement trailer was good with Charles Dance voice-over but barebone with just concept art. I get that MS/Relic don't want to show experimental gameplay but a new cinematic trailer was to be expected.
3) According to Klobrille a known MS leaker, AoE4 is ahead of schedule.
4) Relic's former communication lead (Benjamin Boudreau) talked about early AoE4 community consultation/betashttps://community.dawnofwar.com/discussion/15995/well-relic-q-a/p4

@loksunl said:
The beta just too late for making needed changes before release.
Why relic not make a alpha or included more old player as test group?
Do you think relic need to rethink the decision process of game direction?
Did the relic team learn enough to make a good AOE4?
I am a AOE fans too(not much as a DOW fan), I only have more doubt for RELIC's ability after today.

r_benb said:
Your points about betas and players as part of our process have been a huge point of discussion in the studio. I can't get into much detail here but even before the launch of DOW, the AOE team has been working very differently to make user research, early play-testing, and community consultation a much bigger part of how we make games.

As the producer for our Beta program, you are a key link between the players and the development team. You will be responsible for the day to day management and execution of our Age of Empires Franchise Beta program, an important initiative where early and prototype builds of our Age of Empires titles are provided to players for feedback and extended test opportunities.

The radio silence is not strange. E3 has lost it's importance as many companies either decided to skip (Sony) or prefer to make their own private events in order to release bigger news.

If you don't have anything concrete and good to show up, there's no point in releasing a half baked trailer with alpha gameplay on it. E3 has been transformed in CGI vids in galore.
The best part of the E3 in the last years had been the sketches from Devolver Digital.

Even if AoE4 was ahead of schedule (which would be great news), it's more than probable that it will be put on hold till they release both definitive editions.

Even if AoE4 was ahead of schedule (which would be great news), it's more than probable that it will be put on hold till they release both definitive editions.

We shall see, I guess.
I still think MS was in negotiation to buy Relic and when that did not work out Phil Spencer create a new AoE studio. As suggested by Klobrille, Phil Spencer likely have a multi-title agreement with Sega/Relic.

https://twitter.com/klobrille/status/1133497898874875904
@klobrille
I think it's rather obvious at this point that MS is building an in-house team for the Age of Empires franchise while maintaining to work with Relic through MSGP for now. And that's fine as long as they have a strong in-house team and a multi-title agreement with Relic/Sega.

New PCgamer interview with Phil Spencer:Age of Empires 4 is 'making good progress', and Microsoft will talk about it later this year
"We've been incredibly impressed by Relic's capability," says Xbox's Phil Spencer.

"We'll talk about it more this year," Spencer says. "Relic's great as a studio, we're making good progress with it. One of the things I loved about our show [on Sunday] is the things that we didn't show. We had 60 games, 14 first-party games, with 12 shipping in the next year. And then I know, like okay, what's The Initiative working on? Where is Age 4, how's that going? I think Playground has a second team, what's going on with that? Where's Turn 10, they didn't show up?

"So it was cool for us to be able to have a such a full show, and have some things like Age 4 that have been announced but haven't been shown in a while, other things that maybe aren't announced, to still be able to have those continue to drive excitement both through the year and potentially even next year's E3. But we'll talk more about Age 4, yeah."

I asked Spencer if there was anything more he could say about the game. "No, I want us to make sure we're doing that in the right context. The thing I would say is, we've been incredibly impressed by Relic's capability. Obviously they're somewhat local to us being in Vancouver, and we know the studio. They did the best job of, 'here's what we think Age should go to'. And the other thing I'll say is, we are learning a lot revisiting Age 1, and Age 2. As those communities grow again, as those communities continue to exist, they have large player bases, and there's a lot of feedback. So we're really getting good insight. even here as we're putting Age 2: DE, which is playable on the floor, from those communities about things they'd like to see in Age 4, and that's important for us."

Age of Empires is being treated like a big deal again by Microsoft. Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition is coming later this year, and the same treatment is on the horizon for the third entry in the series. It feels like one of Microsoft's priorities as it looks to attract PC players to its new Game Pass offering. Microsoft also announced a 'newly founded' Age of Empires studio on Sunday, too.

*SNIP*
Continuing the discussion, Isgreen reinforced the fact that Microsoft’s new studio founded to work on Age of Empires will not be abandoning this new remaster anytime soon. “The important thing is that even when we do [Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition] and when we are going to start talking about [Age of Empires] 4 later this year, which I am very excited about, we’re not going to abandon the games. We’re still going to support them. People love Age II, and if people just want to play Age II forever okay, that’s cool. We’ll keep making campaigns and stuff for them to do. It really is a long term commitment for us. We want to keep supporting the game.”

"I didn't want people to think this was our attempt to go and push all the other stores out of the way," says Spencer. "In fact, if you want to buy games from us, we want to give you a choice where you buy those games. So the announcement of Halo: Master Chief Collection coming to both Steam and our store was us saying you should be able to buy the games where you want to buy them. We want to make sure the communities are all connected, so we obviously had to work with Valve ensuring that, regardless of where you bought the game, you'd be one community playing together."
*SNIP*
With Steam being the largest of the stores, it makes sense to start there. Spencer says that Valve's also been supportive when it comes to making sure everyone still gets to play together, and he got advice from friends at Valve when it came to bringing the Xbox Game Pass at PC. This doesn't mean more stores are out of the question, and there's no reason why we wouldn't see them appear on GOG or the Epic Games Store somewhere down the line.

As for what's going to appear on Steam, it sounds like it will be most games, at least going forward. "My expectation is that our games will be available on Steam," says Spencer. "You can never say 'always ever', because then something will happen with rights in certain situations where something might not happen, but we have a really good relationship with the team over there. We go over and talk to them about a lot about the plans we have—it's a good, healthy conversation. So there's nothing in our plans that would say there's a reason we wouldn't continue to ship our games on Steam."

Microsoft's also looking into bringing existing games over, and Sea of Thieves was one of the most requested games on Steam, after Halo. It's a matter of finding time to do the work required to get it ready for Steam. Microsoft's not ready to make announcements about it yet.

using technology from AoE4, for example "Relic Link" (anti-cheat-tool, allows player profiles, similar to Battle.net)

AoE2 Multiplayer in the Definitive Edition (using Relic technology)

*SNIP*
Even today, 20 years later, Age of Empires 2 is still played in multiplayer mode. The HD edition on Steam attracts over 10,000 players every day - a respectable number for a strategy game so old in its core. The Definitive Edition will therefore offer a robust online mode. Forgotten Empires "threw out the old netcode completely".

Players can also look forward to increased stability compared to the Remaster of the first Age of Empires. This was created using UWP technology (Universal Windows Platform, a restrictive runtime environment that does not allow mods, for example). Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition, on the other hand, relies on Win32 - and also appears on Steam. Thanks to crossplay between the versions for Microsoft Store and Steam, the community is not split.

That's very important to Adam Isgreen and his colleagues - also regarding the next Definitive Edition of Part 3 and Age of Empires 4 developed by Relic. "Age of Empires 2 already uses technology from Age of Empires 4, for example Relic Link. This is a powerful anti-cheat tool and also allows us to give players a uniform community profile for all games. It's similar to Battle.net."

More information about AoE4 cannot be elicited from the Microsoft employee though. Just this much: "We'll talk about Age of Empires 4 later this year." And: "We've set up a completely new internal Microsoft studio to support the other developers working on Age of Empires." Developers like Forgotten Empires.

I played some AoE and AoE2 but for a short amount of time because the ugly ass 2D sprites didn't make it for me, have been playing Age of Mythology since 4 years old tho. Seems like I'll be picking up AOE2E and can't wait for AoE3E, can't say the same thing about AoE4 tho, I don't have a good feeling for it for some reason.